Thursday, February 28, 2008

As I sat with The Boy, ostensibly to help him with his homework, I realized what he struggled with more than his reading - the medium of his homework. He fiddled and dawdled over each task I asked him to complete, looking at everything but the homework sheet. Finally, as I prodded him he let it all out in one frustrated exclamation of truth.

"I hate papers", he cried.

I actually think that's one of his big problems. He flies by in math, doing it in his head, but struggles with reading and writing. The Boy who can play complex computer games without being able to read all the complicated instructions, simply isn't engaged by paperwork. I began to wonder if I should look for computer games that taught reading.

When I saw Flashcard Friends, I immediately saw possibilities. Flashcard Friends is like a social network, but it can include your child's teacher as well as friends. I am still investigating ways to incorporate it into my son's computer time, but when my daughter saw me watching the introduction video, she immediately asked me to send her the link. I see a lot of promise for her, as well. There are already Flash Cards on the site on so many of the subjects she is now studying and there are even practice tests. If she got her friends to join up, they could share their notes and information by uploading their own flash cards. It's a very interesting concept, and bound to appeal to kids. This is a computer generation, what could be more appealing to them than a site that lets them connect with friends and study at the same time? The site was inspired by kids who wanted a fun way to study using the computer.

There's too much for me to explain, but if you have children of school age from Kindergarten to college, you should watch the video and see how Flashcard Friends can work for them. You can find them at http://www.flashcardfriends.com Here's the press release for the website, it explains it all much better than I could.

Belmont, CA. – February 21, 2008 – Flashcard Friends combines social networking—a la Facebook and MySpace—with online learning. The inspiration for Flashcard Friends came when the founders of the company, Kendall and Ryan Hogan (now ages 15 and 12) were being forced to create flashcards by their whip-cracking father. They complained that “flashcards are lame…why can’t we do them on the Internet…and why can’t they be fun like MySpace.” Their father, Mike, a web 2.0 entrepreneur, started asking questions about how it might work. Kendall and Ryan described a social network where students could create flashcards and share them with their classmates; or teachers could create flashcards and share them with their students.

With the help of their father, Ryan and Kendall defined what they wanted their website to do. Then their father recruited a top-notch team of developers and got it built. You can now see their website at www.Flashcardfriends.com. Following in their father’s footsteps, Kendall and Ryan are second generation web 2.0 entrepreneurs.

Old school (printed) flashcards are a powerful and proven memorization tool. By using them, Kendall and Ryan were able to substantially improve their test scores. But online flashcards enable a lot of very powerful capabilities. For example, spelling, pronunciation of foreign words, automated testing and correction, images, all of this and more is a snap with Flashcard Friends.

Once the flashcards are in the system, you can share them with friends. The Hogan kids are now looking forward to the day when they return from summer break, only to inherit online flashcards from the class ahead of them. In addition to finding flashcards through friends, you can navigate through flashcard decks by category (e.g. math > algebra), or search by tags, keywords, and more.

Some of the website’s functionality:• Create flashcards with text, pictures and sounds (ideal for foreign languages)• Four different learning modes: find one that fits you, or use them all• Auto-magically creates tests from the flashcards and then corrects them• Uses social networking to manage sharing card decks• Find existing flashcards by subject, school, teacher, book and more• Speak into your computer and add the recording to the cards instantly• Turns a spelling list into spelling flashcards with a spoken version of each word• Includes web 2.0 technologies like user ratings, bookmarking and tagging• …and much more

Flashcard Friends enables students to create flashcards, share them, memorize them and then test themselves. Flashcards can be used at every level, from Kindergarten to post-graduate, and for every topic, from learning colors to preparing for the legal bar exam, learning a language, or studying for the SAT.

Nancy Ferraro 5th Grade Teacher, Granite Bay, CA: “I was very excited to discover Flashcard Friends. I introduced it to my 5th grade students, and we have been using it ever since. The students like how easy the site is to navigate, but they are so jazzed to see their friends’ flashcards. My students have already exchanged flashcards on multiplication, fractions, the 13 colonies, and space. All this in one week! I will definitely use this site for all of my classroom flashcard needs.”

About Flashcard FriendsFlashcard Friends, the social learning website, is pioneering the powerful combination of social networking and online learning. The company was founded by students, for students. The entire website is free to all; students, teachers, homeschoolers, everyone. You can register for free at www.Flashcardfriends.com. For more information call (650) 595-2400, or email mike (at) Flashcardfriends.com.

I wrote about my favorite TV show over at one of my other blogs. The show is from the BBC and it is, I am ashamed to say, a reality show. But instead of cramming a bunch of strangers into a house and watching sparks fly, this show takes two women who are cleaning experts to some of the dirtiest homes in the UK and let's us watch as they perform their cleaning magic.

I must confess, cleaning is not my life. In fact, my life is a bit untidy, which I like to believe is a result of my creativity. I have gone so far as to bookmark and refer people to a NY Times article that basically concluded that creative people are disorganized by nature. It's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

Mostly, I like this show because it makes me feel better about the state of my own house and allows me to say "well, at least my house doesn't look as bad as THAT". But the strangest thing is that the chidren now watch it with me, The Boy opining that we should call in Kim and Aggie to show us (and him) how to be tidier and The Girl wanting to try out all the cleaning tips.

After viewing two episodes yesterday, The Girl decided to vacuum and dust the ceiling fans, while The Boy busily began cleaning drawers and organizing them. I sat and watched in amazement until I finally had to call a halt to the cleaning fest after The Girl ran the vacuum so long she overheated the motor.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

With a week home from school, children find new ways to be bored or new ways to make you think they are languishing in a bored state when really they are doing something dastardly. Such a one is The Boy.

The Boy has shown a great interest in tools. In order to foster his interest in a safe and constructive way, I have bought him numerous kits from the crafts store. The thing is that he hardly ever shows a great interest in putting these thing together, not even the toolbox. He's very happy once it has been constructed and he loves the smaller-sized but real wrenches and screwdrivers that come with the kits. In fact, he prizes them above all and will immediately set about using them to do what he does best - deconstruction.

The Boy's great interest in life is not in putting things together, but in taking them apart. He has disassembled a robot, an artist's easel and a gumball machine - all Christmas presents. Disassembly yields even greater prizes, for he then has a pocket full of screws and nuts and bolts that jingle-jangle and he proudly makes his deconstructed music everywhere he goes.

I suppose you could say he has a curious mind - takes things apart because he wants to know how they work. That would be very comforting, but I am afraid he takes things apart just to get the parts. Perhaps he is planning some large and secret construction of his own. That is an unsettling and yet amusing thought.

I wonder what he will make with a robot head, some wing nuts, a plastic bubble and a dry-erase board?

Monday, February 18, 2008

The children have a week off from school, which they face with great joy and I face with great trepidation. Keeping two children happy and occupied with something constructive for 9 days in a row is not an easy task. Especially since, in the time-honored tradition of siblings, their preferred occupation is bickering with each other.

A little fighting and arguing between siblings is to be expected, even more so because their age difference has always been a part of it. Teen girls basically view 8 year old boys as a disease. I expected this 9 days to seem like 9 years.

But so far they have surprised me. The Girl decided to play school with The Boy. I even heard her reading a book to him - and he was actually listening! The Boy never allowed me to read to him until he found a Goosebumps book about garden gnomes that come alive and do mischievous things. That sounded scary enough to interest him, and scary enough to require my presence while it was read.

After the reading, it went quiet for a while, then for a while more. Finally, the silence was too much - I burst into the room to check on them. Appears it was nap time at school and I interrupted.

That's a key lesson, however. I have decided that children make bloodcurdling noises and scream over nothing in order to reassure mothers that they are still alive and well. It's when it all goes quiet that you wonder what could possibly be wrong. You can't really ignore it, because they might be doing something dangerous. If they are not, then it becomes obvious to them that you have noticed how quiet they are and feel that they aren't living up to their potential.

Equally inadvisable is to notice how good they are behaving and compliment them on it. It sounds like the right thing to do - reinforcing good behavior and rewarding it with praise - but again, children realize they have been lax in their duties and will redouble their efforts to make noise and fight.

I am trying to re-educate myself and work on changing my instinctive reactions. Even now, as The Boy decides to clean the refrigerator, I am smiling and being totally non-reactive to his assurances that "only three eggs broke" even though I desperately want to know how they got broken.

The children have a week off from school, which they face with great joy and I face with great trepidation. Keeping two children happy and occupied with something constructive for 9 days in a row is not an easy task. Especially since, in the time-honored tradition of siblings, their preferred occupation is bickering with each other.

A little fighting and arguing between siblings is to be expected, even more so because their age difference has always been a part of it. Teen girls basically view 8 year old boys as a disease. I expected this 9 days to seem like 9 years.

But so far they have surprised me. The Girl decided to play school with The Boy. I even heard her reading a book to him - and he was actually listening! The Boy never allowed me to read to him until he found a Goosebumps book about garden gnomes that come alive and do mischievous things. That sounded scary enough to interest him, and scary enough to require my presence while it was read.

After the reading, it went quiet for a while, then for a while more. Finally, the silence was too much - I burst into the room to check on them. Appears it was nap time at school and I interrupted.

That's a key lesson, however. I have decided that children make bloodcurdling noises and scream over nothing in order to reassure mothers that they are still alive and well. It's when it all goes quiet that you wonder what could possibly be wrong. You can't really ignore it, because they might be doing something dangerous. If they are not, then it becomes obvious to them that you have noticed how quiet they are and feel that they aren't living up to their potential.

Equally inadvisable is to notice how good they are behaving and compliment them on it. It sounds like the right thing to do - reinforcing good behavior and rewarding it with praise - but again, children realize they have been lax in their duties and will redouble their efforts to make noise and fight.

I am trying to re-educate myself and work on changing my instinctive reactions. Even now, as The Boy decides to clean the refrigerator, I am smiling and being totally non-reactive to his assurances that "only three eggs broke" even though I desperately want to know how they got broken.

I think my mother's love of clocks began with her mother and stemmed from the old grandfather clock that occupied a prominent place in her family's home. I was fascinated by this clock as a child, and loved to watch the pendulum as it ticked away the time. I noticed that nearly all my grandmother's offspring incorporated grandfather clocks into their decor. My grandmother also had a cuckoo clock - not as impressive as the grandfather clock, but it was delightful to wait and watch for the emergence of the tiny herald of the hour. Days spent visiting my grandmother would have been fairly boring without these timely distractions.

My mother kept lots of clocks, mantel clocks, cuckoo clocks, and various decorative wall clocks. I inherited this clock obsession, but I think that for me, it's a need to watch the time. I have always felt time slipping away, and I am more comfortable when I can convince myself I have a firm grip on it. I even keep one clock set to daylight savings time year-round, just so no changes sneak up on me unawares.

Luckily, clocks can also be decorative as well and functional, so I can indulge my obsession with a little style and flair. And there is even a Clocks Blog to help me feed my obsession and give me interesting facts and histories of all kinds of clocks. I was particularly drawn to this article on mantel clocks and how distinctive and elegant they become when set atop a fireplace mantel. If you're lucky enough to have a fireplace, then I highly recommend having a mantel above it and a roaring fire in it.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

I have been writing at Helium for about a month now and I see both its potential and its limitations. I have seen both positive and negative reviews of the site as a writing site and I think that each argument has some merit.

For instance, as far as publishing my writing on the web, I am perfectly capable of doing that myself. I should probably do it more often as several of my blogs are slightly behind on the updating schedule. They do offer payment in the form of a percentage of the advertising revenue. However, I have my own advertising revenue of which I get the entire payment. What they may offer in this area is wider exposure and possible higher ranking in the search engines.

What they do offer that is a boon for those who are considering freelance writing is an opportunity to submit articles for review to publishers who will pay for the article if it is the one chosen. It's a bit like a cattle call, in that many other members will be writing for the same opportunity, but that makes the selection of your article by the publisher even more satisfying. You have to beat out a lot of other articles to get noticed. Additionally, it's a place to get started in the area of freelance and build a portfolio of work.

That being said, I am not straying from Helium anytime soon and have begun to concentrate on the publisher opportunities rather than any other venues and channels. I have had some success here, and have sold several articles.

What anyone gets out of a site like Helium is what they put into it, but they must know what it is they want before they start. For a blogger, the prospect of writing just to see it on the net is not enough to warrant putting a lot of effort into what is essentially, someone else's site. But if a blogger wants to enhance their resume and broaden their experiences by learning to write on someone else's demand, it's a decent training ground.

If anyone is interested, my Helium pages can be found here. A list of my articles can be found here.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

From the time I was a young girl, I had aspirations in the area of art and drawing. I asked for and received an art kit for Christmas. I followed all the lessons, practiced all the techniques and worked with patience and diligence until I had experience enough to realize that I was not "gifted". Lacking the natural talent to be an artist however, was not a total failure - for I find often that having not quite enough talent is sometimes what is needed to recognize real talent when it does exist.

And my interest caused me to spur interest in my young nephew, who showed such a natural gift and ability, that he went on to art school. I realize that inspiring and encouraging talent is the second greatest ability to possessing that talent.

That's why I wanted to highlight an online gallery for the artwork of art students. Some among these students are tomorrow's art legends. There was a time when no one had heard of Picasso, after all. These works are from students at art schools, colleges and universities all over the country and they place their art for sale here.

Nearly every style, medium and genre is represented. If you want to support the arts and these students, go browse the gallery. You can search by artist, medium, genre, price and even color. I think it's wonderful that these new artists can display their work and have a chance to sell it. Think how exciting that must be! I can only liken it to the experience of a writer/blogger who has just received his first comment and realizes that someone is actually reading. For the artist, he knows someone sees what he sees, and believes it is of worth. This gallery is just another way the Internet is opening up avenues of expression for all creative artists.